McCaskill: House Climate Bill Won't Pass The Senate

The climate change bill that squeaked through the House just before recess doesn't have a chance in the Senate, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said Tuesday.

"If there is going to be enough support for the bill, it will be a very gradual implementation as we move toward changing to wind and solar and other kinds of energy," McCaskill told conservative Missouri talk radio host Mike Ferguson. "I'm going to be one of those trying to craft it in a way that is very gradual, that is not going to hurt a state like Missouri that is so coal dependent."

McCaskill cast herself as an emissary of bipartisan compromise on climate change, but acknowledged that Democratic leadership's urgency on the issue is a function of dire warnings from the scientific community and a desire to set an example for the year-end climate change summit in Denmark.

She said she's in no rush to take the lead on a cap-and-trade approach, given what she sees as less-than-satisfactory action by other global powers. "We need to be a leader in the world but we don't want to be a sucker. And if we go too far with this, all we're going to do is chase more jobs to China and India, where they've been putting up coal-fired plants every 10 minutes," she said.

Her solution for Missouri's coal-driven energy supply, she said, would be a decade-long shift toward sequestered coal or other unnamed sources of energy.

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Comments

[gladiator777]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html

These guys were wrong then, they are wrong now, they're computer models obviously suck....they predicted an ice age and the same guys now predict warming, whatever.....

[RomeoMD25]

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers.

Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history.

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02.

[Bcasey11]

this bill is a bureaucratic nightmare, it includes creating a whole new federal agency committed to inspecting your home to make sure its "up to the standards" I come from a liberal family, no right wing madness here, but this bill isn't anything worth passing, the democratic leadership are way to confident if they think their getting away with this

[rlmcbc]

I am amazed at how gutless this woman has become. I voted for her. she is no different than ben nelson or evan bayh or those other moderate Senators from the Midwest with no spine they are really just undercover republicans. They are why Obama is having so much trouble with his health care plan

[Illy]

We need to stop letting the Perfect be the enemy of the Good. The House bill may not be perfect, but it's a whole lot better than doing nothing and waiting for unchecked carbon emissions to cook us all into extinction. Obama needs to bend on the tariff issue - if we ca tax imports from countries that don't implement carbon limits, the job-loss argument is a non-issue.

[pfrogger]

well said McCaskill. once again you have saved Montana, or at least the coal industry within it.
America, paid for by the corporations, and for the benefit of the corporations

Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

and then of course there are the obvious environmental issues. acid rain anyone?
don't worry about the health problems either. they only effect children and the elderly. and who cares about them. and those with respiratory issues.
Deadly power plants? Study fuels debate - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/
"Health problems linked to aging coal-fired power plants shorten nearly 24,000 lives a year, including 2,800 from lung cancer, and nearly all those early deaths could be prevented if the U.S. government adopted stricter rules, according to a study released Wednesday."

http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/1519/Coal-ENVIRONMENTAL-HEALTH-CONCERNS-ABOUT-COAL.html

[bradwieser]

Where is all the acid rain I read about as a kid, or the whole in the ozone, why are the rain forests still here? Why do none of these evironmental disasters ever happen? When was the last time the UN gave us a 10 year period to stop global warming? 1989.


According to July 5, 1989, article in the Miami Herald, the then-director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Noel Brown, warned of a "10-year window of opportunity to solve" global warming. According to the 1989 article, "A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of "eco-refugees,"

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=37AE6E96-802A-23AD-4C8A-EDF6D8150789

[gladiator777]

Excellent, another horrific bill thrown to the trash bin of history, good riddance.

[ibsteve2u]

lollll....my, but you guys do love to gamble, don't you?

Personally, I pity anybody evenly remotely connected with the industries that cause global warming should the worst come to be. Humans can be...so vengeful, so retaliatory...when faced with imminent personal oblivion.

But what is tomorrow, when there is money to be had today, eh?

[gladiator777]

CO2 isn't going to ruin earth, its not a pollutant, plants do need it you know, can it kill us if there are insanely high concentrations, sure it can, oxygen can also kill us...

On naval submarines its at 8000ppm, and they are absolutely fine.....

I'd worry about real pollutants, in the land rives and air...CO2 is nothing to be worried about, and if you knew your history you'd know that CO2 is actually lower than it normally is...

[Mike Barden]

Haven't we heard that "un-named sources" before?

[Mike Barden]

As you can see, there are some issues that just raise my hackles.

[Mike Barden]

Bush had no problem Frenchin' the Arabs.

[ezeflyer]

Don't trust anyone over thirty.

[tarryd]

I'm 65 but you may be right. Doing the right thing never occurs to any politician if they are facing an election soon. Oh, Claire, how disappointing. Even you have no cuhones!

[lizardbrain]

She's an Obama sycophant, so that is a pretty strong statement. I don't know why she thinks she has to protect coal. Black lung rocks!

[wizedollars]

Finally someone on the Hill that is using some common sense and is not being rushed to the guillotine.

[alvdh1]

Wize Dollars,

Finally, a guy who has the timerity to stand up and embarrass himself by contributing zero reasons for your comment. It must be really comfortable to allow regulated utility monopolies to make your energy choices for you and then receive a guaranteed rate of return for providing dirty and mismanaged power plants without a hint of competition. Is it the safe zone for you where you really don't have to think through the issue because naturally power comes from turning on the light switch and then you get a bill that doesn't include the externalized cost of power production associated with air and water pollution and respiratory illness. Cap and trade will ultimately price these externalized cost into your electric bill. Thereby, making wind, solar and biomass competitive with coal and nuclear. The day of artificially priced energy is coming to an end.

[AtlasV]

We need this bill. All of us. From the university professors to the coal miners, the baby boomers to the generations X-ers, and across the political spectrum, from the liberal of liberals to the conservative of conservatives: WE NEED THIS BILL. Climate change legislation will be the engine that drives this country out of this recession and back atop the international ranks. It will give us a competitive advantage over much of the global community and help us play catch-up to countries like Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom who are all miles ahead of us when it comes to investment in renewable energy technology. We cannot rely on our current system - it is broken and in dire need of fixing. This bill does just that by phasing out the old and ushering in the new. I understand how a new system of energy production and of government legislation regulating that production can be intimidating, but I say have faith. Have faith, as this country has so often before in time of crisis, that we will overcome the difficult challenges that face our nation today, and once again rise to greatness.

[guinganbresil]

This bill is a job killer. It will push us further into recession. Look at Spain.

Yes, I know MediaMatters fully debunked the report - but half of their argument was ad hominem attacking the associations of the author, the other half of their argument claimed that the study did not list the actual jobs lost.

Read the actual report. The logic is sound, the examples of lost jobs are concrete.

"We read it so you do have to" - someone is hiding the truth.

[BannedNBoston]

Gerald Celente on the Cap and Trade Scam " Truth11
cap-and-trade tax, Climate Change, Gerald Celente, Government, News, ... Bush, Ford, General Electric, IBM, and the Wall Street bankers are responsible for more ...truth11­.wordpress­.com/.../0­4/gerald-c­elente-on-­the-cap-an­d-trade-sc­am